Except there wasn’t any bright light. And I wasn’t greeted by a bearded man standing in front of pearly gates.
My vision settled and I stared up at a bright, blue sky from a position on my back. I forced myself to sit up, my muscles aching as I did so. I was sitting in a clearing, surrounded by narrow-leafed trees with pale bark and winding branches. Beneath me was a mulch of half-rotted leaves that gave off a pleasant, earthy scent. Beyond the trees were the high peaks of mountains that could have been the Himalayas, but the cliff I’d fallen off was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of the crag that had ended my life.
Fortunately, neither were the ninjas.
I stood and felt soft ground beneath my bare feet. I stretched my toes and enjoyed the feeling of leaves crumbling between them.
Bare feet? Where had my socks and boots gone? I’d heard of having your socks knocked off by a powerful experience, but that was just a metaphor, right? No more real than...
A talking, flaming sword?
When I peered across the clearing, I saw the sword and the orb lying among the detritus. I hurried to grab them, but as my fingers took hold of the weapon’s ornate hilt, it faded like a mirage. I reached for the orb, and it disintegrated, too. It didn’t exactly crumble into ash, but it disappeared as though it was never even there to begin with.
The thing I’d risked my life to preserve—hell, possibly lost my life to preserve—was gone. The sword, too, was no longer there. The magic I’d wielded—calling it technology seemed ridiculous now—was no longer available to me. And now, I didn’t have any weapons to defend myself.
At least I wasn’t stark naked, like I would be if this were an anxiety dream. I still wore the same jeans and hoody I’d been wearing when I reached the research facility. In a moment of paranoia, I checked for underwear and t-shirt, and was relieved to find that they were both still there.
But now what?
The trees surrounded me on three sides, but on the fourth, the ground sloped downhill toward a dirt track. For a minute, I considered staying where I was, just in case whatever had brought me here might carry me back home. But waiting was a mug’s game; it meant leaving your fate in someone else’s hands. I had to take control and face whatever the world had to throw at me.
I stepped out of the clearing and onto the dirt track.
The sun warmed my face as I walked for a mile or so along the track. It wound between terraced hillsides, their stepped fields planted with rice paddies and rows of unfamiliar vegetables. There were occasional isolated houses, presumably the homes of the families who farmed this land. Most were simple wooden structures with reed roofs, sometimes raised on stilts to create a flat base on the uneven hillsides.
After a mile, the hills fell away, revealing a wide area of open land either side of a meandering river. A city sat there, one side pressed up against a mountain, the other against the river. Buildings with layers of curved roofs stood jumbled together, some towering toward the sky, others only a single storey tall. Most were made of wood, some of them painted in red, black, and white. Brightly colored paper kites fluttered in the wind above the fields beyond.
I rubbed my eyes, blinked, and looked again. Sure enough, the city was still there. Primitive, fantastical, and very, very real.
My mind wavered with a dizzying realization that something incredibly strange had happened to me. Rather than continue walking, I sat by the side of the road and tried to work out what on earth was happening.
Was this the afterlife? Why did it look like some primitive region of Asia? The landscape and architecture definitely looked Asian—did my afterlife have something to do with having an Asian father? I knew so little about the religious traditions of my old man. He’d left before I was born, and my mother hadn’t upheld any religious beliefs. My mother had been a classic English agnostic, the sort of woman who went to church at Christmas but didn’t have a Bible in the house. On my fast track through the education system, I’d managed to skip over most of what passed for religious education. For all I knew, this was where Confucianists went when they died. Maybe I really had spattered across that landscape at the bottom of the cliff and some family connection had brought my spirit here.
It didn’t seem like much of an afterlife though. Where were the ghosts of people I’d known and lost, like my grandmother or the goldfish I’d owned when I was small? Mister Yellow deserved a shot at vengeance for my failure to feed him, didn’t he? And where were the gods or demons waiting to judge my soul?
Then, I remembered the orb and the trick Chugayev had pulled with it. Maybe whatever had powered the sword had let me use the orb as well, saving myself by traveling back in time. I hadn’t actually felt my body crash into the crag, so maybe the orb had transported me here before I’d actually hit the rock. Maybe I wasn’t really dead. Just somewhere else. Sometime else.
It sounded crazy, but no crazier than some of what I’d seen in the past hour. I knew that the orb could take me back a few minutes—why not a few hundred years? That would explain the architecture, the dirt roads, the lack of any sign of industry or technology. It wasn’t a perfect position to be in, leaving behind the world of cell phones, streaming services, and 7-Elevens, but better to live in the Middle Ages than die in the modern world.
But if I was
